9 Online Marketing Strategies for Your Business

For some entrepreneurs and small business owners, life can get real crazy real fast. And sometimes, in the mix of trying to balance managing your team with catering to your customers, we forget about marketing our business. Honestly, it’s pretty tough to scrape together the time to research, plan, and drive an effective marketing campaign.

But the fact remains; you need to be generating leads, converting those leads into customers, and keeping those customers happy.

Your marketing strategy is the foundation for all of this. Let’s take a look at 9 online marketing strategies for your business.

1. Be Social

Yes, networking events and building face-to-face relationships are (or should be) a huge part of your business, but we’re talking about online networking today. (Read my blog on networking here)

A lot of businesses are on social media, but they’re not doing it right. I know you’ve seen it, post after post, tweet after tweet, with nothing but pictures of their products or sales pitches for services. The fact is, this is SOCIAL media. Get social. Engage with your audience. Let them into your world, and get to know them. Ask questions, run contests, and listen to what they’re saying. Then build a product or service to solve their problems.

2. Build Loyalty

Growing your customer base is awesome. Keeping it is even more awesone. Make sure you’re engaging with your current and past customers, as well as potential future ones. Create a rewards program, run special promotions for current customers, or launch a special giveaway for return purchases. Listen to your customers and find ways to show them you care.

3. Utilize the Power of Email

When you wake up tomorrow, roll out of bed, and grab your phone, take notice to what you do first. More than 80% of people check their email before anything else in the morning. Yes, we all typically spend more time on social media, but social sites come and go. You’ve had email for what seems like forever. It’s the original social media. Use it.

Start building an email list. Create a quality piece of content and offer it to people in exchange for their first name and email. Then, don’t bombard them with sales pitches. Instead, focus on delivering high-quality, informative content. Your audience will learn that clicking on links in your emails is a good thing. So when you later make that sales pitch, they’ll be more likely to click it.

4. Be Content-Driven

There’s a reason “content marketing” is such a hot topic right now; because it works. People don’t want to be sold, do you? Of course not. But we all want to be helped. We all want quality content we can learn from and use to grow ourselves and/or our business. So, why not give your audience the same?

Focus on creating awesome content for your audience. Create a content calendar and stick to it. Once you start delivering great content, people will want it and will be disappointed if it ends. So give them what they want, and they’ll keep coming back.

One part of content marketing a lot of entrepreneurs forget about is the conversion from subscriber to customer. Your content should lead your audience on an educational path. And, for those whom your products or services are right for, that path should end with a sale.

5. Take Advantage of the Power of Video

If you haven’t noticed, YouTube is HUGE. 85% of adults online consider themselves regular YouTube users. Yet, less than 10% of small businesses utilize it for marketing.

Listen to your customers. Listen to your competition. Listen to experts in your field. Listen to your team. Never stop learning. Always look for ways to improve, engage with your audience more, and improve the work environment for your team.

Google is constantly changing the way it looks at sites. Stay up to date with search engine optimization (SEO) trends and make sure your site and all of your content is optimized for targeted keywords. Utilizing Google Analytics and the depth of metrics it provides is key to monitoring the effectiveness of your SEO and overall marketing strategy.

Let’s face it; organic reach on social media giants, like facebook, is dead. They’ve made it pretty clear you need to pay for exposure. If your audience is on social, invest some time and money into a strong advertising campaign.

Pay Per Click advertising can be an extremely effective strategy as well, if you know what you’re doing. There are a lot of variables and a million acronyms to learn (CPC, CTR, PPC, whatever) so hiring a professional firm is never a bad idea. Be sure to research their past results and customer feedback.

9. Never Stop Learning

The biggest mistake any entrepreneur can make is to assume we know anything. The world is changing at an increasingly fast rate, thanks to the insane advancements in technology, and there is always something new we can learn and implement into our businesses. Keep your eyes and ears open, and stay adaptive and willing to learn, change, and grow.

Challenge Accepted?
Put a few (or all) of these strategies in place, and let me know how they’re working for you. Email me at Jeff@enimultimedia.com and let me know what’s working, what’s not, and what you’re struggling with.